Somebody must have turned back the clock. The iconic image of Allen Ginsberg, recalling his “Pentagon Exorcism” days circa 1967 (stars-and-striped stovepipe hat, black-framed eyeglasses, full beard and riveting, innocent eyes), stares at me from corner newstands all over Manhattan. His face is on the cover of Time Out/New York, which dubs him “the spiritual […]

Since this column is about the arts, as well as media and culture, may I recommend three art shows? One, which has the advantage of being online, is “the bauhaus at the busch-reisinger.” It comes to us from Harvard and offers details of Bauhaus design — the thingness of things — in five categories of what […]

By Jan Herman The New York Times finally caught up with us and ran its obituary about David Jiranek. The Jiranek family put on an unforgettable memorial service Sunday at Lucas Point Beach in Old Greenwich, Conn., where he grew up. Dubbed “The David Show” by Todd Hoffman, one of his four half-brothers, it was both touching and irreverent — so much so that […]

Yesterday’s item asking about the design of the granite Ten Commandments monument that was ordered removed from the rotunda of Alabama’s state judicial building brought a response from blogger Mac Diva that may help clear up the mystery. He writes: Jan, it appears the design of the monument was worked out between [Alabama Chief Justice Roy] Moore […]

As long as we’re looking at the issue of Alabama’s Ten Commandments, my staff of thousands thought you might find an old Wall Street Journal story relevant. Unfortunately, it’s not online except by subscription. The headline on the story, when it ran in the print edition in April 2001, gives you the gist of it: “When Moses’ Laws Run Afoul of the U.S.’s, Get Me Cecil B. […]

Nobody has taken Alabama’s chief justice to task for the design of his two-and-a-half ton, granite monument to the Ten Commandments. In fact, not one of the dozen or so news stories I’ve seen about his refusal to remove the monument from the state judicial building mentions the quality of the design or the identity of the artist […]

For all the artistic types who wished they were Leonardo Da Vinci, here’s your chance to express yourself. Now you can Botox “The Mona Lisa.”  EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor gloom of night shall keep the postman from his appointed rounds? Well, we hope so. But what about choice reading matter?   Your piece about The Realist brought me back to the summer of 1963 when I was a 19-year-old college student delivering the U.S. mail in Forest Hills, N.Y. One of […]

Awful news has arrived: The remarkable originator of Through the Eyes of Children: The Rwanda Project, someone whose good works were beyond admiration, is dead. His close friend, Jenifer Howard, writes, “It is with the heaviest heart that I let you know that a terrible accident claimed the life of our friend, David Jiranek, on Saturday night. While on […]

New Yorkers got a taste of what William Sydney Porter meant when he called their town Baghdad-on-the-Hudson. “There’s more poetry in a block of New York,” said Porter, otherwise known as O. Henry, “than in 20 daisied lanes.” Last night during the great Northeastern blackout of ’03, he could have said “than in all the […]

It had to happen. Somebody feels put out that this column has dared to invade the sacrosanct precinct of the arts with an alien subject: political opinion. I quote from a message sent yesterday to ArtsJournal editor Douglas McLennan:  “Can you explain what exactly Jan Herman [is] writing about? Are you no longer running an […]

Putting it to Arnold, Slate reminds us of his inflated, risk-averse business reputation. Writer Daniel Gross recalls the bankrupt wreckage of Planet Hollywood and what a “glory hog” our celebrity of the people was as that ’90s restaurant chain went belly up. Arnold never had to put up a dime. (That was lucky, not smart.) All he […]

I don’t know why it took the archeologists to tell us that the Roman emperor Caligula was a maniac. Anyone who’s seen John Hurt’s Caligula in the 1975 British television series “I, Claudius” would have guessed. It was on cable again last week. If you haven’t read the Robert Graves novel that series was based on, or the sequel […]

A critic’s value is not determined by whether he/she’s right or wrong but whether he/she’s a good read. That’s one reason Martin Bernheimer is my favorite classical music connoisseur. (He’s right most of the time, too.) His review in the Financial Times of Fabio Biondi conducting an obscure Scarlati oratorio is the sort of classical-music […]